Arts

08 July 2014
Making colour begins with a quote from the impressionist painter Renoir. He said, “Without paints in tubes there would have been no Cezanne, no Monet, no Sisley or Pissarro, nothing of what journalists call impressionism.”

18 March 2014
Devastation is all the rage these days, with zombie-ridden post-apocalyptic fantasies and lush photographs of urban decay doing a roaring trade in their respective niches. This exhibition traces this modern fascination back through postwar modernism and cities bombed in the Blitz to a 19th century trend for “Ruin Lust”.

07 April 2007
A new exhibition of the work of Glaswegian-born Jimmy Friell has just opened in London. Friell was acknowledged, in the 1930s, as one of Fleet Street’s finest cartoonists, and under the pseudonym Gabriel, he put his humour and his brilliant drawing skills to work for the Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker.

07 April 2007
GhostsDirected by Nick BroomfieldDVD (Tartan Video) £19.99
This excellent film by the documentary maker Nick Broomfield dramatises events leading up to the tragic drowning of 23 Chinese cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay three years ago.

31 March 2007
Socialists have often felt rather uncomfortable with Futurism. This Italian art movement, founded in 1909, sang the praises of new technology, aeroplanes and the mass media &#8211; but it also exalted war and colonialism.

17 March 2007
When Tom Fool, Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1978 drama about the implosion of a working class family in West Germany, was staged at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow last November, audiences were astonished by the power of a play that gets right to the heart of family life under capitalism.